guru.gti

There are multiple ways to cache a drive in linux, lvm cache, bcache, and zfs being the main ones. You also use a partition for caching instead of the whole drive.
 
You can benchmark it, but benchmarking cached storage is a pain as your often just benchmarking the ssd or hdd.
 
 

Yea, but almost no one uses vmware workstation either for large clusters, and all the hypervisors are basically the same, just have the buttons in different places. KVM just works a bit better on linux since its native. If you want to learn a hypervisor, esxi is good to know, but just fire it up in a kvm vm and play with it(make sure to turn on nested virtualization).
 
And tons of people use KVM, like AWS, google cloud, and many other large providers. 
 
And really its not hard to learn. Its just pick cpu, ram, disk and then do what you want in a vm.
You don't have hardware raid here, you would need a raid card for that. The raid on a motherboard uses the cpu for calculations anyways. Software raid is about the same speed if done well, esp with this small of a setup with only 2 sata ssds, where you really aren't seeing many iops.
 
 
 

They do. It's a perk of RAID0 you get the cumulative storage of the drives combined. Again a SSD could be used to accelerate a single drive as oppose to using RAID0.
 
The only difference between hardware RAID and software RAID is dedicated hardware. It's still software RAID just that the CPU handles the RAID instead of a dedicated controller. Performance is going to vary widely based on choice of hardware and File System but for the most part software RAID is a great solution today and is used widely. It may work well for you if you were to virtualize the installations. You could even attach an SSD to the pool for read/write caching.